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This is just codifying the clear pre-existing precedent, only broken by the Democrats themselves, if not prosecuting members of the previous administration. Funny that, after breaking that unwritten rule, they now seek to re-implement it themselves.
SBF deserves to be pardoned, too. Unconscionable that some autistic kid who made very dumb decisions running a crypto business in a sector full of scammers and fraudulent businesses, whose victims didn’t even lose any money (even if some missed out on hypothetical gains) should be sentenced to 25 years in jail, more than almost all violent criminals, rapists, homeless psychopaths and others who are an actual threat to civilized society. High sentences for “white collar crime” are just a way to try and manipulate the demographics of the prison population and make leftists who hate rich people happy.
5 years would have been more appropriate, if you’re a VC who can’t do basic due diligence + can’t think twice about giving huge money to a bunch of kids for their crypto business you deserve to lose it.
SFB took a swing at the king, Dollars, and missed. Trump just threatened 100% tariffs against BRICS for the same potential transgression. Don’t create a competitor to the dollar built on fraud is my take.
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Nah. SBF straight up embezzled money. Lots of other crypto exchanges went down because they made dumb decisions, and their executives didn't get jailed. SBF stole customer funds and gambled with them. That's a crime. Making idiotic loans like the CEOs of Voyager and Celsius did isn't. Given the volume of money he stole, 25 years is pretty appropriate.
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SBF made a mockery of the financial system. That is a bigger offense against the United States and civilized society than all but the worst gangbangers.
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Eh, I could see this argument making some amount of sense for generic bankmen (who both value their own time highly and are likely to be cut off from reoffending opportunities by even moderate prison terms and non-prison punishments such as professional bans). If you are a Shkreli, spending your best 10 years behind bars may not be a prospect that is worth any number of billions in your account. In the case of this particular Bankman, who by all accounts was really an idealist with an agenda beyond lining his pockets, the logic of deterrence, which says keep the expected value of the crime negative, requires greater punishment. If he really thinks he is saving the world if he succeeds, and his value function looks a lot more like his understanding of saving the world than like hedonism-maxxing for himself as a bag of meat and bones, the natural cap of hedonic saturation is blown off and he presumably needs to be threatened with a lot more personal suffering to bring the expected payoff of would-be imitators below zero (at least as long as we can't punish criminal effective altruists by mass incineration of mosquito nets or farming more shrimp).
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He didn't make a dumb decision, he embezzled the customer funds into his own accounts and then gambled with them. It was straight up theft of billions of dollars.
If you believe various studies of how people value their own life, thefts of over $10 million should basically be considered the equivalent of murder.
Hmmm:
If I put 10 ounces of gold in a safe deposit box, and then the bank owner steals 5 ounces and loses it at a casino, but the price of gold triples, the bank still stole from me, even if the bank owner claims that I didn't lose any money since value of my assets are greater now than when I put them in the safe deposit box.
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This seems like conflating two things:
I think most right thinking people would agree with the former, but I'm not sure what's the rationale for the latter.
Agreed on SBF, I buy the interpretation of the situation as "intentionally bad risk management intersected with unintentionally bad accounting", and while this does merit punishment, 25 years seems ridiculous. High profile cases like this and Shkreli's seem to end up influenced by some people just not liking the guys.
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I thought the worst thing he did was take money out of people's accounts that were on the exchanges. "invest at your own risk" makes sense, but it seemed like this was more akin to "put money in a bank at your own risk".
I still mostly agree that 25 years might be too long for that (or even the 18 years he is likely to actually serve). But 5 feels a little too encouraging towards moral hazard problems. I think SBF himself would say he'd gladly take the same risks again if the downside was only 5 years in prison.
That's the thing. SBF would gamble the entire Earth on double or nothing with 51% odds, because of the positive EV. Now he's in prison for 25 years. It's not a coincidence. He knew he was gambling, and he lost.
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